Decentralization is the new disruption—the thing everything worth its salt (and a huge ICO) is supposed to be doing. Meanwhile, Internet progenitors like Vint Cerf, Brewster Kahle, and Tim Berners-Lee are trying to re-decentralize the Web. They respond to the rise of surveillance-based platform monopolies by simply redoubling their efforts to develop new and better decentralizing technologies. They seem not to notice the pattern: decentralized technology alone does not guarantee decentralized outcomes. When centralization arises elsewhere in an apparently decentralized system, it comes as a surprise or simply goes ignored.

Here are some traces of the persistent pattern that I’m talking about:

• The early decentralized technologies of the Internet and Web relied on key points of centralization, such as the Domain Name System (which Berners-Lee called the Internet’s “centralized Achilles’ heel by which it can all be brought down or controlled”) and the World Wide Web Consortium (which Berners-Lee has led for its entire history)
• The apparently free, participatory open-source software communities have frequently depended on the charismatic and arbitrary authority of a “benevolent dictator for life,” from Linus Torvalds of Linux (who is not always so benevolent) to Guido van Rossum of Python
• Network effects and other economies of scale have meant that most Internet traffic flows through a tiny number of enormous platforms — a phenomenon aided and exploited by a venture-capital financing regime that must be fed by a steady supply of unicorns
• The venture capital that fuels the online economy operates in highly concentrated regions of the non-virtual world, through networks that exhibit little gender or ethnic diversity, among both investors and recipients
• While crypto-networks offer some novel disintermediation, they have produced some striking new intermediaries, from the mining cartels that dominate Bitcoin and other networks to Vitalik Buterin’s sweeping charismatic authority over Ethereum governance

This pattern shows no signs of going away. But the shortcomings of the decentralizing ideal need not serve as an indictment of it. The Internet and the Web made something so centralized as Facebook possible, but they also gave rise to millions of other publishing platforms, large and small, which might not have existed otherwise. And even while the wealth and power in many crypto-networks appears to be remarkably concentrated, blockchain technology offers distinct, potentially liberating opportunities for reinventing money systems, organizations, governance, supply chains, and more. Part of what makes the allure of decentralization so compelling to so many people is that its promise is real.

Yet it turns out that decentralizing one part of a system can and will have other kinds of effects. If one’s faith in decentralization is anywhere short of fundamentalism, this need not be a bad thing. Even among those who talk the talk of decentralization, many of the best practitioners are already seeking balance — between unleashing powerful, feral decentralization and ensuring that the inevitable centralization is accountable and functional. They just don’t brag about the latter. In what remains, I will review some strategies of thought and practice for responsible decentralization.

Hat from a 2013 event sponsored by Zambia’s central government celebrating a decentralization process. Source: courtesy of Elizabeth Sperber, a political scientist at the University of Denver

First, be more specific

Political scientists talk about decentralization, too—as a design feature of government institutions. They’ve noticed a similar pattern as we find in tech. Soon after something gets decentralized, it seems to cause new forms of centralization not far away. Privatize once-public infrastructure on open markets, and soon dominant companies will grow enough to lobby their way into regulatory capture; delegate authority from a national capital to subsidiary regions, and they could have more trouble than ever keeping warlords, or multinational corporations, from consolidating power. In the context of such political systems, one scholar recommends a decentralizing remedy for the discourse of decentralization — a step, as he puts it, “beyond the centralization-centralization dichotomy.” Rather than embracing decentralization as a cure-all, policymakers can seek context-sensitive, appropriate institutional reforms according to the problem at hand. For instance, he makes a case for centralizing taxation alongside more distributed decisions about expenditures. Some forms of infrastructure lend themselves well to local or private control, while others require more centralized institutions.

Here’s a start: Try to be really, really clear about what particular features of a system a given design seeks to decentralize.

No system is simply decentralized, full-stop. We shouldn’t expect any to be. Rather than referring to TCP/IP or Bitcoin as self-evidently decentralized protocols, we might indicate more carefully what about them is decentralized, as opposed to what is not. Blockchains, for instance, enable permissionless entry, data storage, and computing, but with a propensity to concentration with respect to interfaces, governance, and wealth. Decentralizing interventions cannot expect to subdue every centralizing influence from the outside world. Proponents should be forthright about the limits of their enterprise (as Vitalik Buterin has sometimes been). They can resist overstating what their particular sort of decentralization might achieve, while pointing to how other interventions might complement their efforts.

Another approach might be to regard decentralization as a process, never a static state of being — to stick to active verbs like “decentralize” rather than the perfect-tense “decentralized,” which suggests the process is over and done, or that it ever could be.

Guidelines such as these may tempt us into a pedantic policing of language, which can lead to more harm than good, especially for those attempting not just to analyze but to build. Part of the appeal of decentralization-talk is the word’s role as a “floating signifier” capable of bearing various related meanings. Such capacious terminology isn’t just rhetoric; it can have analytical value as well. Yet people making strong claims about decentralization should be expected to make clear what distinct activities it encompasses. One way or another, decentralization must submit to specificity, or the resulting whack-a-mole centralization will forever surprise us.

A panel whose participants, at the time, represented the vast majority of the Bitcoin network’s mining power. Original source unknown

Second, find checks and balances

People enter into networks with diverse access to resources and skills. Recentralization often occurs because of imbalances of power that operate outside the given network. For instance, the rise of Facebook had to do with Mark Zuckerberg’s ingenuity and the technology of the Web, but it also had to do with Harvard University and Silicon Valley investors. Wealth in the Bitcoin network can correlate with such factors as propensity to early adoption of technology, wealth in the external economy, and proximity to low-cost electricity for mining. To counteract such concentration, the modes of decentralization can themselves be diverse. This is what political institutions have sought to do for centuries.

Those developing blockchain networks have tended to rely on rational-choice, game-theoretic models to inform their designs, such as in the discourse that has come to be known as “crypto-economics.” But relying on such models alone has been demonstrably inadequate. Already, protocol designers seem to be rediscovering notions like the separation of powers from old, institutional liberal political theory. As it works to “truly achieve decentralization,” the Civil journalism network ingeniously balances market-based governance and enforcement mechanisms with a central, mission-oriented foundation populated by elite journalists — a kind of supreme court. Colony, an Ethereum-based project “for open organizations,” balances stake-weighted and reputation-weighted power among users, so that neither factor alone dictates a user’s fate in the system. The jargon is fairly new, but the principle is old. Stake and reputation, in a sense, resemble the logic of the House of Lords and the House of Commons in British government — a balance between those who have a lot to lose and those who gain popular support.

As among those experimenting with “platform cooperativism,” protocols can also adapt lessons from the long and diverse legacy of cooperative economics. For instance, blockchain governance might balance market-based one-token-one-vote mechanisms with cooperative-like one-person-one-vote mechanisms to counteract concentrations of wealth. The developers of RChain, a computation protocol, have organized themselves in a series of cooperatives, so that the oversight of key resources is accountable to independent, member-elected boards. Even while crypto-economists adopt market-based lessons from Hayek, they can learn from the democratic economics of “common-pool resources” theorized by Elinor Ostrom and others.

Decentralizing systems should be as heterogeneous as their users. Incorporating multiple forms of decentralization, and multiple forms of participation, can enable each to check and counteract creeping centralization.

Headquarters of the Internet Archive, home of the Decentralized Web conferences: Wikimedia Commons

Third, make centralization accountable

More empowering strategies for decentralization, finally, may depend on not just noticing or squashing the emergence of centralized hierarchy, but embracing it. We should care less about whether something is centralized or decentralized than whether it is accountable. An accountable system is responsive to both the common good for participants and the needs of minorities; it sets consistent rules and can change them when they don’t meet users’ needs.

Antitrust policy is an example of centralization (through government bureaucracy) on behalf of decentralization (in private sector competition). When the government carrying out such a policy holds a democratic mandate, it can claim to be accountable, and aggressive antitrust enforcement frequently enjoys broad popularity. Such centralized government power, too, may be the only force capable of counteracting the centralized power of corporations that are less accountable to the people whose lives they affect. In ways like this, most effective forms of decentralization actually imply some form of balance between centralized and decentralized power.

While Internet discourses tend to emphasize their networks’ structural decentralization, well-centralized authorities have played critical roles in shaping those networks for the better. Internet progenitors like Vint Cerf and Tim Berners-Lee not only designed key protocols but also established multi-stakeholder organizations to govern them. Berners-Lee’s World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), for instance, has been a critical governance body for the Web’s technical standards, enabling similar user experience across servers and browsers. The W3C includes both enormously wealthy corporations and relatively low-budget advocacy organizations. Although its decisions have sometimes seemedto choose narrow business interests over the common good, these cases are noteworthy because they are more the exception than the rule. Brewster Kahle has modeled mission-grounded centralization in the design of the nonprofit Internet Archive, a piece of essential infrastructure, and has even attempted to create a cooperative credit union for the Internet. His centralizing achievements are at least as significant as his calls for decentralizing.

Blockchain protocols, similarly, have tended to spawn centralized organizations or companies to oversee their development, although in the name of decentralization their creators may regard such institutionalization as a merely temporary necessity. Crypto-enthusiasts might admit that such institutions can be a feature, not a bug, and design them accordingly. If they want to avoid a dictator for life, as in Linux, they could plan ahead for democracy, as in Debian. If they want to avoid excessive miner-power, they could develop a centralized node with the power to challenge such accretions.

The challenge that entrepreneurs undertake should be less a matter of How can I decentralize everything? than How can I make everything more accountable? Already, many people are doing this more than their decentralization rhetoric lets on; a startup’s critical stakeholders, from investors to developers, demand it. But more emphasis on the challenge of accountability, as opposed to just decentralization, could make the inevitable emergence of centralization less of a shock.

What’s so scary about trust?

In a February 2009 forum post introducing Bitcoin, Satoshi Nakamoto posited, “The root problem with conventional currency is all the trust that’s required to make it work.” This analysis, and the software accompanying it, has spurred a crusade for building “trustless” systems, in which institutional knowledge and authority can be supplanted with cryptographic software, pseudonymous markets, and game-theoretic incentives. It’s a crusade analogous to how global NGOs and financial giants advocated mechanisms to decentralize power in developing countries, so as to facilitate international investment and responsive government. Yet both crusades have produced new kinds of centralization, in some cases centralization less accountable than what came before.

For now, even the minimal electoral accountability over the despised Federal Reserve strikes me as preferable to whoever happens to be running the top Bitcoin miners.

Decentralization is not a one-way process. Decentralizing one aspect of a complex system can realign it toward complex outcomes. Tools meant to decentralize can introduce novel possibilities — even liberating ones. But they run the risk of enabling astonishingly unaccountable concentrations of power. Pursuing decentralization at the expense of all else is probably futile, and of questionable usefulness as well. The measure of a technology should be its capacity to engender more accountable forms of trust.

Learn more: ntnsndr.in/e4e

If you want to read more about the limits of decentralization, here’s a paper I’m working on about that. If you want to read about an important tradition of accountable, trust-based, cooperative business, here’s a book I just published about that.

Photo by CIFOR

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Cory Doctorow: In July, the Director of the World Wide Web Consortium overruled dozens of members’ objections to publishing a DRM standard without a compromise to protect accessibility, security research, archiving, and competition.

EFF appealed the decision, the first-ever appeal in W3C history, which concluded last week with a deeply divided membership. 58.4% of the group voted to go on with publication, and the W3C did so today, an unprecedented move in a body that has always operated on consensus and compromise. In their public statements about the standard, the W3C executive repeatedly said that they didn’t think the DRM advocates would be willing to compromise, and in the absence of such willingness, the exec have given them everything they demanded.

This is a bad day for the W3C: it’s the day it publishes a standard designed to control, rather than empower, web users. That standard that was explicitly published without any protections — even the most minimal compromise was rejected without discussion, an intransigence that the W3C leadership tacitly approved. It’s the day that the W3C changed its process to reward stonewalling over compromise, provided those doing the stonewalling are the biggest corporations in the consortium.

EFF no longer believes that the W3C process is suited to defending the open web. We have resigned from the Consortium, effective today. Below is our resignation letter:

Dear Jeff, Tim, and colleagues,

In 2013, EFF was disappointed to learn that the W3C had taken on the project of standardizing “Encrypted Media Extensions,” an API whose sole function was to provide a first-class role for DRM within the Web browser ecosystem. By doing so, the organization offered the use of its patent pool, its staff support, and its moral authority to the idea that browsers can and should be designed to cede control over key aspects from users to remote parties.

When it became clear, following our formal objection, that the W3C’s largest corporate members and leadership were wedded to this project despite strong discontent from within the W3C membership and staff, their most important partners, and other supporters of the open Web, we proposed a compromise. We agreed to stand down regarding the EME standard, provided that the W3C extend its existing IPR policies to deter members from using DRM laws in connection with the EME (such as Section 1201 of the US Digital Millennium Copyright Act or European national implementations of Article 6 of the EUCD) except in combination with another cause of action.

This covenant would allow the W3C’s large corporate members to enforce their copyrights. Indeed, it kept intact every legal right to which entertainment companies, DRM vendors, and their business partners can otherwise lay claim. The compromise merely restricted their ability to use the W3C’s DRM to shut down legitimate activities, like research and modifications, that required circumvention of DRM. It would signal to the world that the W3C wanted to make a difference in how DRM was enforced: that it would use its authority to draw a line between the acceptability of DRM as an optional technology, as opposed to an excuse to undermine legitimate research and innovation.

More directly, such a covenant would have helped protect the key stakeholders, present and future, who both depend on the openness of the Web, and who actively work to protect its safety and universality. It would offer some legal clarity for those who bypass DRM to engage in security research to find defects that would endanger billions of web users; or who automate the creation of enhanced, accessible video for people with disabilities; or who archive the Web for posterity. It would help protect new market entrants intent on creating competitive, innovative products, unimagined by the vendors locking down web video.

Despite the support of W3C members from many sectors, the leadership of the W3C rejected this compromise. The W3C leadership countered with proposals — like the chartering of a nonbinding discussion group on the policy questions that was not scheduled to report in until long after the EME ship had sailed — that would have still left researchers, governments, archives, security experts unprotected.

The W3C is a body that ostensibly operates on consensus. Nevertheless, as the coalition in support of a DRM compromise grew and grew — and the large corporate members continued to reject any meaningful compromise — the W3C leadership persisted in treating EME as topic that could be decided by one side of the debate. In essence, a core of EME proponents was able to impose its will on the Consortium, over the wishes of a sizeable group of objectors — and every person who uses the web. The Director decided to personally override every single objection raised by the members, articulating several benefits that EME offered over the DRM that HTML5 had made impossible.

But those very benefits (such as improvements to accessibility and privacy) depend on the public being able to exercise rights they lose under DRM law — which meant that without the compromise the Director was overriding, none of those benefits could be realized, either. That rejection prompted the first appeal against the Director in W3C history.

In our campaigning on this issue, we have spoken to many, many members’ representatives who privately confided their belief that the EME was a terrible idea (generally they used stronger language) and their sincere desire that their employer wasn’t on the wrong side of this issue. This is unsurprising. You have to search long and hard to find an independent technologist who believes that DRM is possible, let alone a good idea. Yet, somewhere along the way, the business values of those outside the web got important enough, and the values of technologists who built it got disposable enough, that even the wise elders who make our standards voted for something they know to be a fool’s errand.

We believe they will regret that choice. Today, the W3C bequeaths an legally unauditable attack-surface to browsers used by billions of people. They give media companies the power to sue or intimidate away those who might re-purpose video for people with disabilities. They side against the archivists who are scrambling to preserve the public record of our era. The W3C process has been abused by companies that made their fortunes by upsetting the established order, and now, thanks to EME, they’ll be able to ensure no one ever subjects them to the same innovative pressures.

So we’ll keep fighting to fight to keep the web free and open. We’ll keep suing the US government to overturn the laws that make DRM so toxic, and we’ll keep bringing that fight to the world’s legislatures that are being misled by the US Trade Representative to instigate local equivalents to America’s legal mistakes.

We will renew our work to battle the media companies that fail to adapt videos for accessibility purposes, even though the W3C squandered the perfect moment to exact a promise to protect those who are doing that work for them.

We will defend those who are put in harm’s way for blowing the whistle on defects in EME implementations.

It is a tragedy that we will be doing that without our friends at the W3C, and with the world believing that the pioneers and creators of the web no longer care about these matters.

Effective today, EFF is resigning from the W3C.

Thank you,

Cory Doctorow
Advisory Committee Representative to the W3C for the Electronic Frontier Foundation

Photo by Intrepidteacher

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